


Dust to Dust

by bluelivid



Category: Titanfall (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, Gen, Not Beta Read, Simulacra, also kind of crude talk of bodies, but that's a given, kind of, not bad but its there, talk of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:08:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25258999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluelivid/pseuds/bluelivid
Summary: Ash wakes up. Programming, if it was there at all, does nothing to keep her human, and it doesn't take long for her to realize something is off. Rebirth is a strange thing, isn't it?
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	Dust to Dust

**Author's Note:**

> 5 am word dump in honor of the final apex quest. i am exhausted. i also still firmly believe that the simulacrum they're building is ash and she's going to be the next legend. let me have this, okay?
> 
> edit: I WAS RIGHT. WE GOT ASH. RESPAWN I OWE YOU MY LIFE
> 
> also i CANNOT stress how important the not beta read tag is. i'm serious i didn't even go back to reread this i just wrote and posted.

When Ash wakes, it is not peaceful.

It is a swirl of bright lights, the hum of electricity, and the feeling of being pulled out from a freezing lake, into air cold enough to kill. It is sudden, abrupt. She feels the veil of nothingness rush away from her like a cascade of water. The piercing, chilled space around her prickles at metal, not skin, and this is what triggers the first realization.

Her fingers are metal. Her arms, too. Scarred skin missing, replaced by smooth, cold metal. Her elbow is not a joint. There is no bone, no muscle, no tandem cooperation of her skeletal and muscular system. Instead, there are gears, a small contraption mimicking a human elbow.

She trails her eyes up her arm, to find the point where metal switches to skin, where the prosthetic ends and she begins. Fingers to wrist, wrist to elbow, elbow to shoulder. Searches, finds nothing. When she pulls her other arm up to feel along her shoulder, feeling metal and only metal, skeletal fingers pressing along where her collarbone should be, down to her chest, metal too, armor-like. She stops at her stomach, misshapen torso sloping abruptly under her hand. She lacks the expected intestines. There is nothing in the cavity of her guts, aside for the base of her spine, where she feels a conjunction of mechanics connecting her legs to her upper body.

There is a fear that tugs at her mind, but she cannot bring herself to look down. She hangs from a string, above an abyss, a sea, of chaos. To cut the rope around her ankle would be to plunge headfirst into that abyss, relentless and vicious, hurt and anger crashing upon the rocks of confusion, casting up a mist of brain fog. She struggles to grasp the next set of realizations to come. Should she cut the rope, she would crash into the sea. That is realization number two, and she doesn’t think she would survive. To cut the rope would be to drown. To look down would be to drown.

Realization number three is that there is no way around this. No future lays ahead in which she cannot face this head on. This has no eject button, no evac ship. Wallrunning and jumpkits will not help her here.

She cannot run. She cannot hide.

In order to move forward, she must deal with this first.

So she looks down. She cuts the rope. She plunges.

Shifts her eyes from her metallic arm to the rest of her. Met by a metal frame, she stumbles out of limbo.

And she drowns.

The world around comes into clarity. She is metal. All of her. Her metallic fingers reach up and touch metallic framing. Optics, not eyes. Auditory processors, not ears. There are no lungs to breathe with, no mouth, no stomach, energy provided by the faintest whirring in her chest, processors of some kind. 

Her legs those of a simulacrum, lanky and simple, designed for agility. There is holster on her bicep, or what remains of it, large enough for a knife but too thin for a pistol. A slot for the jumpkit on her back, and more holsters. Surrounding her core processors, on her head and chest namely, is thick, reinforced metal. Not quite bulletproof, though it would take far more hits than unprotected human skin before it cracked. Permanent armor.

She had been made into a weapon.

There is a voice, not hers, and its words don’t register the first time it says them. A wave of something white and glinting, and repetition.

She looks up, sees a mask, held out by a gloved hand. She takes it from the hand, tilts it in the light, examining it. It is pale and somber. A face. She thumbs through mental files to pin it to someone, something. Searching through worryingly sparse information, she finds one lone file, and isolates it, bypassing a mental firewall and several alerts.

She swims through this new state of mind, and grasps the profile displayed in her digital brain. It is her. There is equally as little information on it as there is in the rest of her database. A scan of the mask, labeled in standard font. The death mask of whatever pilot she had been. 

Precise weight and height, of this new chassis, not of her old body. The numbers are even, rounded out. Never to change. Stable.

She skims the profile, then skims it again, and runs a preliminary search through her current database. There is nothing here of her old life, nothing she does not know already. Her only clues, the death mask, and her designation.

Codename, Ash.

**Author's Note:**

> anyways i love ash sm and if we don't see her again at some point im losing it.
> 
> u know the drill: kudos and comments appreciated. find me [here](https://clownbasedintrigue.tumblr.com/)
> 
> also dw im going to reread this in the morning so i'll catch any mistakes xoxo see yall then


End file.
